


Thicker Than

by onvavoir



Category: Strange Empire (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 09:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5451056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onvavoir/pseuds/onvavoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For KayleeFrye Yuletide 2015 - found family</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thicker Than

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KayleeFrye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayleeFrye/gifts).



It's been six weeks since the bizarre reappearance of Jeremiah Loving. Rebecca counts it in nights, the ones she spends watching Kat keep watch. She speaks fewer words now, Mrs Loving, and she was not a capacious speaker to begin with. Medically, she seems to suffer from some kind of shock. She has not responded well to Rebecca's requests to study it, or to offer a course of treatment.

Rebecca has never slept much-- Thomas always said that it was a consequence of her overlarge brain and the pressure it exerts on her skull. She has since started to doubt this-- as she doubts a great many things Thomas told her. His voice comes to her sometimes in quiet moments, querulous and critical, usually when she's doing something he would disapprove of. She's learned to ignore it. There were great gaps in his knowledge of the world which he did not acknowledge, and she struggles to fill them in his absence. He was the source of all wisdom, and he dispensed it to her in doses he thought appropriate. Periodic, modest, never frequent or substantial enough. It left her perpetually hungry, perpetually curious.

Her education in the wilderness of Canada has been quite the opposite. It comes in fits and starts, feast and famine. Kat says that a woman with a weaker constitution would sicken with it. The medical veracity of her claim is somewhat in question, but Rebecca keeps this to herself. She is learning when she should speak, and when it would be best to stay silent.

*

All's as well as can be expected. Better than she might have hoped, all things considered. One husband dead, a second absentee. 49 per cent of the mine, hers thanks to Mr. Albert Everett Smythe. The two of them, she and Mrs Loving, aren't friends, not quite. Isabelle doesn't have many of those, and she suspects Kat doesn't either. It's not bonhomie, it's a kind of necessary dependence. They rely on each other, in a way they could never rely on their men. Good or bad, they never seem to last long.

She makes no move on Cornelius, though she watches him. He's made inquiries about her husband, her spies have told her. Tried to find out where he might be. Good luck with that, she thinks with a smile. 

Isabelle's considered having him killed. It would be easy. She thinks out all the ways it could be done. Poison. Something swift, like a snakebite. Something that'll puff him up black in the face, swell his tongue, make his throat tighten and close. No, too good for him, a quick death. Better for it to be slow. Better for him to puke his guts out and crawl through his own filth before death takes him. Her lip curls.

She thinks about it too often. There's a devil in her, John would say. If he was able to say anything. But he's as quiet as the dead can be. She speaks to his spirit, nonetheless. It's restless. It haunts the house. He seems to hang in the in the shadows, to suspend in the beams of light that pass through the windows. He whispers her name, and she starts awake in the dead of night.

*

She wakes up muttering his name.

"Jeremiah--"

The rage and grief rise, overcome and swallow her up. She tries to be quiet. If the girls hear, they don't say anything. Kat lies in the blue half-light before dawn and waits for the tears to subside. 

When she's sure she can present a brave face, she gets out of bed and dresses. She thinks the same thing she always thinks as she buttons up her shirt and puts on her gun belt.

She has to tell him. She has to tell Caleb. He's in Washington. A letter could take weeks. She could send a telegraph from the big house, but she's loath to ask. It's not just about asking Isabelle for a favour. 

The children know. It was all over Janestown before the dust from the horses had settled. People whisper, like they did early on. They look at her with pity; with veiled prurient interest; they avert their eyes the moment she catches them. She's too preoccupied with her own confusion to be angry with them. There's no space in her skull for any of them anymore. All the healing she'd begun to do before, it's all ripped, ruptured. The things she'd begun to neatly put away, in disarray.

She rides, as she always does, with no particular destination. She pretends not to hope that she'll catch another glimpse of him, find a trace. When the sun comes up she pretends not to be disappointed to find nothing yet again. She rides back to Janestown, eats breakfast with her children, oils her revolver. She does what she's always done: keeps moving. She keeps surviving.

*

Rebecca has heard people say that family is the most important thing. “Blood is thicker than water.” It's the sort of thing that, when she recalls, she always seems to hear in Mrs Briggs's voice. The observation is scientifically correct, but the sentiment behind it is flawed. Rebecca's biological parents abandoned her; Thomas and Emily gave her a home and a family; Mrs Loving found her children rather than birthed them. The ties that bind human beings to one another are more complex, more elastic, than shared names or shared blood. 

For good or ill, all of them in Janestown are tied to each other in ways that none of them can truly comprehend. Mrs Loving, Mrs Slotter-- no, Mrs Smythe-- Rebecca herself, and the rest of their assortment of wounded people. Blood is not what binds them, not in the sense that Mrs Briggs would mean it with that proverb, though they are bound by blood, all of them. She thinks, to be honest, that apart from surgeries and births, it would do them all good to see less of it from now on.

Mrs Loving comes back from her morning ride and rubs down her horse. Up at the house Mrs Smythe-- though she has asked Rebecca to call her Isabelle-- comes down the front steps with a shawl around her shoulders. The sun, just risen past the horizon, makes her shield her eyes. Light passes through the trees and draws a bright line across Rebecca's vision. She holds up her hand against it. Across the street Mrs Loving's face is shaded by the brim of her hat. Still, Rebecca thinks she meets her eyes for a moment. The hat bobs incrementally. Rebecca smiles. 


End file.
